


Out of ashes, out of cinder

by Ser_Renity



Category: Bleach
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Candice POV, F/F, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, Other, POV Third Person, Recovery, abuse recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 14:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7366054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ser_Renity/pseuds/Ser_Renity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Candice remembered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of ashes, out of cinder

**Author's Note:**

> Ayooo, here I am with a fic for one of my current favorite ships (and some of my favorite characters!). It's a funny feeling to be the first to use a tag on here tbh?? such an honor I cannot believe
> 
> But yeah, here we go! Mind the warning about the past Bambietta/Giselle, that is where you will find the abuse. I want to write something about Giselle as well and am aware of how terrible it is to demonize the only trans character in the Bleach universe BUT my focus here is on Bambietta and her recovery because that is an important subject too, imo.  
> REALLY IMPORTANT NOTICE: The "Other" category is for Bambietta because in the last scene you will find a reference to her being genderfluid/unsure of her gender!! This has absolutely nothing to do with Giselle and is not me being absolutely gross by sorting a trans!girl in the "Other" category. It's really important to me to make sure to add this here for clarity!
> 
> Enjoy!

* * *

 

 

Later Candice wouldn’t remember what she was thinking as Giselle knelt down next to Bambietta’s scorched remains- maybe she wasn’t thinking at all, just a puppet on a string.

  
Maybe the things on her mind were something like “She better hurry up!” or “How bad are the injuries to keep Bambi down like this?”. Maybe there was jealousy tightly packed among all other ideas, too, jealousy directed at Giselle for being able to be this close to their self-proclaimed leader.

  
In the end that hardly mattered. When Bambietta got up next she looked at Candice with dead eyes and her dark skin tinted gray. A zombie, a full-fledged one.

  
Giselle smiled then, like she always did when she found a new toy. It didn’t use to be like this- years and years ago her and Bambietta were very sweet to each other, bickering and smiling like they meant it. Then there was war and there was genocide and Candice remembered seeing their kind exterminated, running for her life back into the arms of an empire that was so, so difficult to escape from.

  
“Look at her,” Giselle said now, among the rubble in the Soul Society on the brink of an all-out offensive, “She’s so cute like this. Aren’t you, Bambi?”

  
Bambietta opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out, her eyes vacant, her fingers spread apart like branches on a barren tree.

  
An icy shiver ran down Candice’s spine and she felt like something gigantic, something so much more significant than them suddenly shifted, fell into place.

  
Drool ran down the side of Bambietta’s chin, dripped into her ripped collar. She looked obscene with her mouth parted and her eyes hooded, swaying on the spot.

  
Candice wondered if she could feel this, if she was here to witness herself become a zombie. It was alright, wasn’t it? They could reverse this, couldn’t they? All they had to do was win this fight, take revenge for all those others who burned years ago.

  
Candice loved to fight, loved the heady rush of it and the feelings of her electric wings spreading out behind her, the sound of her thunderbolts taking effect. Six swords of lights, sent straight into an enemy’s chest. She loved it, loved the noise and the smell and the sweat on her brow as she pushed herself to the limit.

  
This felt nothing like it; this felt like an ending to a short story where she was meant to draw deep conclusions, find worth in the worthless and move on to be a better person.

  
“We gotta go,” Liltotto muttered at her side, “We can’t let the dudes have all the fun.”

  
Candice remembered staring at the backs of the other Sternritter from the last of the rows, seeing Bazz B shift restlessly as if he couldn’t wait to jump head-first into battle. Others seemed less interested, most of them were determined to finish all of this as soon as possible.

  
His Majesty was on his mission somewhere and they were entrusted with the fight down below- it seemed logical to Candice in the shadow of the Silbern. Down here it made less sense but as she stared at Bambietta’s slack face she didn’t know what to make of anything else.

  
“What’s the matter, Candy?” Meninas asked her and giggled, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  
“Do you want a taste of her, too?” Giselle chimed in, “Don’t you say things like that, Candy, or I’ll get really jealous.”

  
She pouted, brushing her hair absentmindedly.

  
Candice grimaced at them and turned away.

  
“Let’s go kill some shinigami instead of talking about some bullshit here,” she said and flipped her long mane of hair, “Got pins and needles already from doing nothing.”

  
Bambietta’s stare was on her mind as she made good on that promise- tried to destroy a special war power and landed in the dust after Bazz B shot a bullet of fire through her rib cage.

  
She remembered taking on the shinigami’s forces in a desperate last resort before the Auswählen hit, stripping the flesh off her bones and the mind from matter.

 

* * *

 

 

Candice awoke in a haze of pain, a forgotten cadaver underneath the debris of Soul Society’s buildings; a wake of destruction and the smell of burned bodies in the air. Her breath was hot on her own skin and she let her fingers twitch to see if they were still there. All the joints in her body ached as if she had aged in her sleep, waking up with hair as white as snow and an exhaustion she could never shake anymore.

  
As it were, she was still the same young undead woman she had been for nearly a millennium. They took her childhood for the army, put a weapon in her hand and a brand on her soul like every other sad idiot ending up in Yhwach’s empire.

  
Candice was not normally as cynical but she felt it now, in every inch of her injured body- that bitterness, that gallows humor. _His Majesty_ was a joke.

  
She tried to get up with her head spinning and the bile rising in her throat.

  
“Fuck you,” she told her failing legs as if they could react to the insult, “Fucking work already.”

  
Candice cursed up a storm as she began to shake - weakness and anger alike. The damp strands of her curly hair hung in her face, stuck to the sweaty skin of her forehead. Pebbles dug into her palm. The ash in her lung made her cough.

  
“Shit!” she yelled, not caring who heard her, “Screw this, this is bullshit!”

  
There was no reply and it made her even angrier that her enemies had not seen it fit to finish her off. Neither had Yhwach, though, and one glance at the sky reaffirmed that suspicion.

  
The Quincy crosses in the sky were like gravestones, marking the locations of all those unlucky Sternritter who had not been chosen to accompany their emperor to his new throne.

  
Candice spat on the ground and gnashed her teeth together in a feral snarl. Oh he would pay, that fear-mongering old man, she would show him thunder where he had planted it in her person.

 

* * *

 

 

As she staggered through the ruins it was Meninas she found first.

  
“Oh Candy,” she said and pressed her lips together so tighly it looked like they were gone, “I don’t know what happened.”

  
“Yhwach. He used the Auswählen on us.”

  
“But why would he do that, why would he-”

  
“He doesn’t give a shit about us,” Candice snarled and tightened her hands into fists, “This has all been for naught, don’t you get it? He never meant for us to be okay.”

  
Meninas looked shocked for a second but resignation set in soon enough. They had known, like bird knew they had to travel south in the winter. As Quincy, they had known. All the hope never meant a thing, never bought them a meal in the human world.

They were a doomed race from the start, with all the worlds on their heels and only an empire with a mad king to protect them.

  
Candice knew, then, that they had to find a way.

  
“What about the others?” she asked, “What about them?”

  
Meninas looked at her with pity, her beautiful red hair burned and sizzled.

  
“Bambi’s dead,” she said and it hurt, so much, more than it had any right to, “Giselle and Liltotto went to get revenge. I think they died, too, along with Bazz.”

  
“So who’s left?”

  
“The new Schutzstaffel, maybe? I think this time it was Pernida, Gerard, Askin and Lille. None of them vanished yet.”

  
Candice didn’t know any of them as anything but distant acquaintances- but she knew Bambi cared about one of them at least. What did it matter, now that she was dead?

  
“What are we gonna do?” she whispered to herself, “Fuck, what does this mean?”

 

* * *

 

 

As she was taken to the prisons by shinigami no Quincy were in the Schutzstaffel anymore.

  
“They burned their bodies,” her guards said, “They were exterminated immediately.”

  
_Oh Bambi,_ Candice thought, _I’m sorry your weird poison friend died. I wish you were here to mourn him._

  
It turned out she was there, right between the other prisoners, a mindless corpse with no one around to control her.

  
“Bambi?” Candice asked.

  
The girl on the prison bench drooled and smiled, all teeth and no emotion. A zombie indeed.

 

* * *

 

 

Candice wanted her so bad that it hurt some days, wanted Bambietta close and safe and sound, her friends okay and unharmed. But Bazz B refused to associate with any other Quincy and Meninas was in a different ward. There was nothing to say, nothing to learn..

  
So she talked under her breath to the corpse of the girl she loved.

  
“Can you revert it?” she asked the guards and got no answer, “Can you make her okay again? Just for a while?”

  
Candice rarely cried but she wanted to at this point, wanted to break down and scream but Bambietta was watching with undead eyes. Those pupils would haunt her forever, the death of it all. So terrible, so all-encompassing. It hurt to think, to breathe, to see inside the shinigami’s prison.

 

* * *

 

 

When she was young Candice was poor, a rat on the streets until His Majesty let his soldiers pick her up and swallow blood until she knew how to shoot lightning from her fingertips and thunder from her eyes.

  
Candice loved her powers but she swore in French when she could and thought of home; of a place she wanted to show to Bambietta, a place to grow old even though they never could.

  
All through this hell she was so, so in love.

 

* * *

 

 

When she remembered these days later it would not be with any fondness, none of that gratefulness outsiders tried to make survivors feel.

  
_You could be dead! You could have lost more than you did!_

  
Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve- Candice didn’t care when she awoke later in safety and stability, knowing that her friends had found a way around, a way back to her.

  
When Bambietta looked at her now there was no death in her eyes, no trace of that alien cold. It was the girl Candice had had a crush on for centuries again, in all her explosive beauty. Well, maybe that temper had cooled a little bit and maybe her words were never as harsh as they used to be.

  
“I love you,” Bambietta said once, her dark eyes gentle and sincere. She lay on her side on their mattress, just watching.

  
Candice felt the lump in her throat as she got choked up- always so confident until the girl she loved said something like this.

  
She chastised herself- the _person_ she loved. It would take a while for her to fully change her way of thinking but she would do it, took it very seriously for once. Bambietta was important.

  
“I love you too,” Candice said and couldn’t keep her grin down, “I love you so, so much.”

  
Then she reached out and pulled Bambietta close, hugging her as tight as physically possible. Her skin was hot to the touch; Candice watched her, took in the long curls of black hair, the way she bit her lips and blinked coyly.

  
Bambietta moaned as she was kissed, her skin flushed and breathing heavy. She spread her legs for Candice to sit between, ran her fingers through green strands until they were so tangled she felt they could never part.

  
They weren’t the best with words, had never been, but this was their territory, their specialty. Skin to skin, so wrapped up in each other there was no empty space anymore.

  
Candice kissed her girlfriend breathless, over and over again, left red marks on her neck and trailed her lips up to Bambietta’s temple, back to her mouth.

  
“Easy there, Candy,” Bambietta said and giggled, “Or you won’t last.”

  
“You know who you’re talking to, right?”

  
Candice interlaced their fingers and went back to her very important task, running her hands up and down her girlfriend’s sides under her shirt.

  
“I’m talking to the girl of my dreams,” Bambietta said, “The official thunder babe.”

  
Candice flinched backwards with her cheeks burning, a shiver running down her spine. There was a time and place for chastising herself for being so easily affected but it wasn’t now.

  
Bambietta shot her a supremely cheesy grin, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively.

  
“You’re so cute when you’re blushing. Lighting up like a christmas tree.”

  
Candice pouted.

  
“That’s not cute, that sounds like I have malfunctioning lights stuck to my boobs or something.”

  
“What?”

  
“Y’know, like those damn nipple patches. Just get those glitter balls and stick them to your boobs.”

  
“Oh my god.”

  
“Some of them might even change color.”

  
Bambietta sat up and kissed her again, as deep and passionate as she could.

  
“I love you,” she said, “You dorky thunderbolt, you.”

  
Candice whined and hid her face in her hands.

  
“Love you too,” she muttered and peaked out between her fingers, “I was gonna call you a bombshell for a second but puns are terrible.”

  
Bambietta laughed, a child-like giggle that had her voice hitching every few seconds. She scrunched up her nose and kept laughing until she wheezed, there was no stopping with her once she got really started.

  
Candice watched it unfold, all her patience reserved for these little moments. She kept them all close, tucked between her heart and her rib cage. Happy enough to last another thousand years.

 

* * *

 


End file.
